Once again today, I was reminded of what I consider to be one of my worst character flaws: my inability to speak my mind in stressful situations. There's this part in You've Got Mail where Meg Ryan speaks a truth I've lived by for a long time, where she delineates between two kinds of people. Because of my inability to find this particular scene (and the fact that my parents have the DVD I thought I owned), I'm just going to paraphrase: "there are two kinds of people. The ones who can say exactly the perfect thing in a situation to cut the other person down to size, and the people who can't."
Obviously, bad paraphrasing. Sorry, fans of the best movie ever made.
But the point is, I'm one of the latter kinds of people. No matter what the situation is, no matter how offended I am or will be in the minutes after that situation, the "right" thing to say just never occurs to me just at that moment. In the last few weeks, I've come to loathe that about myself. Kathleen Kelly (of You've Got Mail) has this wonderful breakthrough moment where she says exactly what she wants to say (to the unknown love of her life, of course), but there's never a reason why she suddenly finds this part of her personality. There's no catalyst for her newfound ability to say those mean things that other people can say. How can I get that?
Today I had a run-in with a very irritated older gentleman over the parking situation in the shared Nickelodeon/Immaculate Consumption lot. I had used an accepted parking trick in a completely full lot, and thought I was being courteous by leaving a note on my car directing one to the Nick office. But this older, entitled gentleman with his Mercedes SUV apparently does not park often in the Immac parking lot much and wasn't aware of the general practices, and so when he came outside and saw his car blocked in, he decided to lay on his horn for several minutes rather than trying to solve the issue politely. To be perfectly fair, I've been in his position. And like all parking situations, you calmly look for the owner of the blocking car, and ask that person to move. No threatening, no yelling. It's the downtown area, folks, parking ain't all neat rows anymore. He threatened to tow me next time (ironic, as it was my first time using this move), stared me down as I climbed into my car, and acted totally aggrieved in a completely common situation.
And you know what the really shitty part was? When he asserted that I was never to park that way again, all I said was "yes sir." As he was a complete asshole to me - I can't describe the situation well, or I won't so I don't get mad all over again - all I did was complacently apologize for something that isn't even wrong. And to some extent, by not explaining the unspoken rules of the Immac parking lot, I was actually harming others - when Jordan's car gets towed by this same asshole (he uses that maneuver far more often than I do), I will partially take blame because I never explained to this entitled gentleman how this parking lot works.
I really thought about the situation on the drive home from work, and in that short time became increasingly frustrated. Brian told me to put it out of my mind, but it's not just a single encounter - it's a systemic error. That fact just slays me. When I think about how the stronger people in this world would go about resigning, or how the Heather Bauers of this world would deal with Andy, it really makes me hate that part of my nature that makes me handle situations in the least confrontational way possible. No matter the level of the conflict, I'll go into fight-or-flight mode and just come up with the best way to avoid tension.
How do I crack that code?
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